Headline: RIFS Blog January 2019

Climate policy is most effective when it helps people use alternative energy sources, rather than when it makes fossil energy more expensive, argue Anthony Patt and Johan Lilliestam.

The United Nations’ climate talks in Katowice, Poland this past December wrapped up with an agreement on the terms to finalize most of the Paris Rulebook and set the 2015 Paris Agreement into action. While the parties agreed on many important issues, the final text comes up short on several key fronts.

Exhibiting the fastest growth among all fuels in the electricity sector, renewables are about to fundamentally change the energy system. This change is hoped to bring about important social and economic co-benefits, including sustainable and affordable energy for all, green job opportunities, and increased human health and wellbeing. But there may also be some fundamentally political implications of the low carbon shift. This is what a high level group of global leaders was tasked to look into, the result of which was published in their recent report titled A New World The Geopolitics of the Energy Transformation, published by IRENA, the international renewable energy agency.

It smelled like smoke when I arrived in Katowice, Poland, early on a Sunday morning, at the start of last December’s UN Climate Change Conference COP24. It instantly reminded me of landing in Beijing for the first time in 2016: back then the smell of coal-tinged air was immediately present upon walking up the jetway into the shiny, ultra-modern Beijing airport.

Even before taking up office, the new Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro called into question the country’s role in the global climate protection regime. He caused considerable alarm when he withdrew the Brazilian offer to host the 25th session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, just days before the start of COP 24. On top of this, it was revealed that Bolsonaro’s pick for the role of Minister for Foreign Relations considers global warming a plot by “cultural Marxists”. These announcements and other controversial statements by members of the incoming administration cast a shadow of uncertainty over the future of environmental governance and climate policy in Brazil.

The adoption at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Katowice of a rulebook for the implementation of the Paris Agreement is an important milestone – but the international community should not be content with this.